Facebook messed up again. The social media giant has found themselves at the wrong end of PR nightmare, after users were confronted with a number of upsetting and sexually explicit auto-predicted search results on Thursday night. As The Guardian reported, the glitch started happening around 4 am in the UK, leading anyone who searched “video of” to some very NSFW content. Suggested searches turned up things like "video of child abuse" and "video of girl sucking dick under water." As one would hope, Facebook has apologized for the screw up.
The company said in a statement: “As soon as we became aware of these offensive predictions we removed them. Facebook search predictions are representative of what people may be searching for on Facebook and are not necessarily reflective of actual content on the platform.” Hmm...sounds like someone’s blaming the victim here. Facebook maintains that they “do not allow sexually explicit imagery, and we are committed to keeping such content off our site.” What about my pregnant high-school friend’s sonograms, though!?
All jokes aside, Facebook isn’t the only internet company having this issue. Google caught some heat for some inappropriate suggested searches like, “are jews evil” and “are muslims bad.” However, the incident looks especially bad for Zuckerberg & co., seeing as how just last week, Facebook ran a survey asking users if they would be down with pedophiles soliciting children for sexual pictures. TF? Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of product, said the surveys were run “to understand how the community thinks about how we set policies.” Pretty sure the community is overwhelmingly against that, bro.
